The forecast calls for hybrid computing. Vendors have signaled a truce in the cloud-versus-on-premises marketing war. They’re acknowledging the hybrid reality in most enterprises with products built to combine or straddle both environments.

But how do hybrid companies pinpoint where each individual snowflake should fall? How do they know if a workload is happy at home on-prem, or crying out to move to public cloud? Or if it needs some virtualized means to traverse both?

“It comes down to people a lot of the time,” said Matt Yanchyshyn (pictured, right), director of architecture practice and guidance at Amazon Web Services Inc. Yes, the unique requirements of individual applications are a factor, but so too are the skills of people on board.

“Different teams may be at a different point of agility in terms of [developer operations],” Yanchyshyn said.

What are the markers of cloud-readiness?

“If their software runs on x86 infrastructure, and if they’re already using [continuous integration and continuous delivery], for example, and if they’re used to containers [a virtualized method for running distributed applications], then they’re going to be good candidates,” Yanchyshyn stated.

Pivotal Software Inc. has partnered with Amazon Web Services Inc. to meet different companies and teams wherever they are with appropriate software and services.

Yanchyshyn and Nick Cayou (pictured, left), vice president of global ecosystem at Pivotal, spoke with John Walls (@JohnWalls21), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Justin Warren (@jpwarren), chief analyst at PivotNine Pty Ltd, during AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. They discussed Pivotal’s work with AWS and the formula for smart hybrid-IT moves. (* Disclosure below.)

Legacy apps act as if

About 70 percent of Pivotal customers are running workloads on-prem. But they are expanding those apps out to AWS cloud. Pivotal is trying to teach these customers that cloud is an operating model, not a single destination, according to Cayou.

A big part of the work in hybrid IT is enterprise apps — “legacy monoliths that need to be decomposed and moved into a cloud operating model, modernized through things like data services that we can expose though our platform to something like AWS,” Cayou said.

They can access these services though Pivotal Cloud Foundry’s Service Broker for AWS. “It makes it easier for you to adopt AWS services,” Yanchyshyn stated.

More hybrid customers will likely adopt Pivotal Container Service and blend it with their AWS on-prem cloud services, according to Cayou. These are the types of happy mutations coming out of AWS’ new friendliness with on-prem environments, he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Pivotal Software Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Pivotal nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE